When we look up the history of an English word in a dictionary, generally we find that the word has its origin in Dutch, Spanish, Greek, French, and other languages. Very few words in a rather large dictionary come from Anglo-Saxon, a group of dialects spoken by the original Germanic invaders who invaded England in the fifth century.

Generally, this is not the experience that people have when they consult dictionaries of other languages. There is no other language in the world that has not imported words from other languages, but in English such importations are very frequent.

A language like Polish is different. Poles, for example find that the most basic words of their language come not from Dutch, Greek, and French but from the protoslavic language that produced the Slavic family. And the vocabularies of languages like Chinese, Arabic, and many other languages with a literary tradition also come from a single ancestral language.

Of all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, 99% (ninety-nine percent) came from other languages. Bt the 1% (one percent) of the words that came from Anglo-Saxon also are the most frequent ones in English.

Thus words of Anglo-Saxon origin such as "and," "but," "father," "love," "fight," "to," will," "should," "not," and "from" are fundamental to the use of English. But the greater part of our vocabulary comes from a variety of other languages, and not only Latin, as in the case of words such as "adjacent" and "expedite." English has many words that come from a diversity of languages that we English speakers consider to be as essential as the Anglo-Saxon words cited above.

It is possible, naturally, to compose brief texts with only Anglo-Saxon words and coin new words from elements of these Germanic forms for more abstract concepts, for example "speechcraft" instead of "grammar," but practically it would be impossible to write books without the use of many words that have their origin in a rather large group of other languages.

Thus, the vocabulary of English is like the architecture of San Francisco, California, with many beautiful buildings, but a very small number of buildings constructed before the earthquake and fire of 1906 (nineteen oh six). English lost most of its original vocabulary because of three lexical "earthquakes."

The Vikings invaded the northern half of Britain starting in 787 (seven eighty-seven). They spoke a Germanic language that is the ancestor of the contempoary Scandinavian languages. Their language was not very different from the language of the Anglo-Saxons, and the two peoples were able to understand at least 80% (eighty percent) of what they said when they had conversations in their respective languages.

The Vikings contributed about 1,000 (one thousand) words to English, such as "both," "same," "again," "get," "give," "are," "skirt," "sky," and "skin." If I said to you that "on a foggy Thursday, a sly, dirty-necked, scowling outlaw skulked into the bank with a knife, ransacked it, and crawled out of the window seemingly happy," each word would be a contribution from the Vikings except for "a," "into," "the," "with," "it," and "out."